As daily life becomes even more complex, people increasingly need to effectively manage a wide variety of types of information. In particular, people need the capability to store a broad range of types of information in such a manner that the information is easily accessible when needed.
Unfortunately, people are frequently unable to remember some types of information without assistance. For example, some types of information need to be remembered frequently, but a particular instance of the information need be retained for only a limited time (e.g., the location where the car keys were last left or the location in which the car was parked this morning). For such types of information, a typical human often remembers the information when it is later needed, but at least occasionally will be unable to remember the information. Other types of information may be difficult to remember due to the volume of information or the circumstances under which it is acquired. For example, after meeting another person, many people can remember the name and face of the person, as well as other related information (e.g., a phone number or birth month). However, after meeting a large number of people at a party, a typical human remembers such information for at most a small number of the people. In other situations, people take video recordings (e.g., a still picture or a stream of video frames) or audio recordings of information which they have perceived but cannot fully remember without assistance (e.g., of a song or of beautiful scenery). For yet other types of information, the information may be sufficiently complex or may be needed so infrequently so as to prevent mental recall (e.g., credit card and frequent flier numbers, or a rarely-used numerical value such as pi).
Due to people's inability to remember information, a variety of techniques and devices have been developed to assist people in storing and recalling information. For example, some people carry portable audio recording devices (e.g., a DICTAPHONE® device) on which audible information can be quickly stored, while others textually store information of interest on a portable medium (e.g., on a hand-held computer, on a paper-based DAY-TIMER® calendar, on POST-IT® notes, etc.). Some people may even carry video recording devices (e.g., a camera or camcorder) to record scenes or events of interest.
Unfortunately, these existing techniques and devices for storing and recalling information have various problems. Consider, for example, the situation in which a person encounters a large number of people at a party and would like to store a variety of information about each person, such as their name, face, and telephone number. Devices able to record only a single type of information, such as audio, video, or textual information, would be unable to store some of the desired information about the people encountered. If different devices were used to each store one type of information, it would be difficult to associate the different stored information and quickly retrieve the disparate pieces of information when needed. In addition, while storage devices having a linear storage mechanism (including most audio recording devices and camcorders) can quickly store large amounts of information, this form of storage mechanism makes retrieval of desired information (e.g., Bob's telephone number and face) difficult because the only available means of searching is sequential and not indexed. Moreover, each of these techniques and devices store information only at the explicit direction of a user. Thus, if a user does not recognize the need to store information while it is available, these techniques and devices will not allow the information to be later recalled. For these and a variety of other reasons, existing techniques and devices do not fully meet the needs for storing and recalling a variety of types of information.